Rencke shrugged; he didn’t mind who took the punishment. “I leave it to you, Doctor,” he said shortly. “You are in charge here.”
“Thank you.” Kalitzkin turned to Shaw. “You must do as we ask,” he said, “or there will be trouble for the girl.”
“You’ve already had my answer.”
“Very well, but I believe you will change your mind.” The Russian caught Rencke’s eye and nodded. Rencke moved back to Ingrid Lange’s cage. One of the guards moved in behind him. As before, Rencke’s hand moved fast. The whiplash came down hard, whistling through the air, and the girl spun round, giving a low sob of pain. Shaw noticed the heavy red mark, spreading across her back. Twice more Rencke used the whip and was lifting it again when Shaw snapped,
“Stop that, Rencke!”
Kalitzkin mopped at his forehead and looked much relieved. “You will learn what is required, Commander? It would be so much better if you did.”
Shaw’s mouth was hard, his fingers itching with a yen to squeeze the breath from Rencke’s throat. “I’ll learn,” he answered briefly.
“Good!” Kalitzkin brought his hands together and rubbed them. “It is simple enough, and will not take long. But because perfection is essential, there must be much repetition, you understand? Perhaps I should tell you now — if at the time of the actual broadcast you do not speak exactly as you will learn from me, or if you add anything else of your own, not only will the microphone instantly go dead, but something nasty and very painful will at once happen to Miss Lange.” He cleared his throat. “You will now repeat after me as follows.…”
What Shaw had to say was brief and easy to remember but he recognized its brilliance and its complete effectiveness; he knew that it was quite enough to convince the West and make the brass give one big sigh of sheer relief. They would rush to obey his demands, falling over themselves to call off the search and withdraw all forces immediately from the sensitive areas. They would remain in this happy state of bliss for quite long enough to allow Kalitzkin to deal with the capsule without interruption. Afterwards, when the capsule had vanished and Shaw had failed to re-appear, the world would obviously be at war. The official Russian protests of innocence would never, in the emotional state the West would be in, be believed for a moment. It just was not possible.
After the rehearsal Kalitzkin said, “Tomorrow, when we have completed the final test, we shall rehearse you in the control room itself so that there will be no hitches of any sort.”
After that Rencke and Kalitzkin and the guards pulled out. They left with Ingrid, still naked. She walked out with her head high but her body shaking uncontrollably as Rencke’s hand clutched at her arm.
Impotently, his fists bunched at his sides, Shaw watched from behind the bars of his cage.
TWENTY-FOUR
In the morning, after a bleak, cold dawn had crept unwillingly across the North Pacific and touched the Kuriles to bring up an iron-hard landscape lying beneath a grim, metallic but so far frog-free sky, Ingrid Lange was brought back to her cage by the guards. She walked erect but she turned her face away from Shaw as she pushed through the barred gate, though not before he had seen the look in her eyes — as well as the bruised flesh of her flanks.
She had suffered a good deal during the hours she had been with Rencke. Shaw’s face was like granite. If it was the last thing he ever did in this life, he was going to get Rudolf Rencke.
Now Skyprobe IV was within the range of the tracking station in West Australia. Schuster had been informed some while before that the countdown had started, that all was going well; and by now he knew that Skyprobe V was all set to go from Kennedy within the next few minutes. The atmosphere in the capsule was tense, the nerves of all three men were at their fullest stretch. Schuster had rehearsed again and again in his mind what he had to do to take control from Danvers-Marshall for the docking. He was certain Danvers-Marshall would crack once Skyprobe V approached. For his part Danvers-Marshall had continued doing all he could to persuade the astronauts to get the docking negatived; he would, he had insisted, use his gun if that docking was allowed to take place. He was still plugging this line when West Australia came on the air. He was saying, “Greg, there’s not much time left. You’ve got to get them to negative blast-off. For God’s sake… just say there’s another fault and you won’t be able to open up the hatch. Greg.…” His voice was pleading now. “Greg, we don’t all want to die up here!”
Schuster snapped savagely, “Shut up! I’m trying to hear the station. If you want to play safe, just give me that gun, that’s all!” There was a good deal of distracting background chatter from the ground and he couldn’t make out what was being passed. The voice itself was high and excited and that didn’t help either. But in a while something came through clearly, something unbelievable that rocked Schuster.
Danvers-Marshall asked, “What was that?”
Schuster sat silent for a moment, his thoughts bitter, all hope suddenly evaporated. Then he said bleakly, “You’re safe for a while yet, you Red bastard! Skyprobe V isn’t coming up at all. They found a fault just before blast-off.”
He realized a moment later that he shouldn’t have said anything to Danvers-Marshall — he ought to have let him stew, let his nerves grow tender; but it was too late now. Danvers-Marshall was humming a tune, indicating his sheer relief. This apart, there was the silence of total dismay in the capsule. Schuster and Morris sat glumly in their seats, almost in a state of shock now that their last hope, faint though it may have been, had vanished on the Kennedy launch pad. Skyprobe IV continued on its way, with Danvers-Marshall’s hand in full and unchallenged control.
They came back soon to Kennedy, back over the launch pads of the Moonport. Klaber’s voice came up to them, close to tears of fury, frustration and anxiety. Jerkily the NASA chief said, “Greg, it was a complete burn-out of a whole range of equipment we can’t possibly replace in the time. We have just twenty-four hours to go and believe me, it’s out. It’s literally impossible to go through the whole procedure in the time.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Schuster said bleakly.
“I’m sorry, Greg, You can imagine how we all feel, down here… all we saw was just the burst of orange and yellow smoke from out the base of the rocket and after that — just nothing. The rocket just didn’t lift off the pad. The engines cut two seconds after ignition… the system found the fault and automatically shut off the engine, but by that time the damage had been done.”
“What about the crew?”
“They’re all right, thank God,” Klaber said.
Soon after that Klaber went out of communication. As Skyprobe IV went on for the Canaries he walked to his car and drove back to his office. If only they had more time… in twenty-four hours they couldn’t hope to make the repair, start the countdown, blast-off, get a capsule into orbit, and dock on. There was nothing more any man could do now other than to hope the searching forces found the base — or that the Britisher, Shaw, was still on the job after all and could get results in time. And without a shooting war.
After a meagre breakfast Shaw was removed from the cage by four armed Chinese guards. He was taken along the corridors of the silo and up a flight of concrete steps to the control room, where one large television screen, standing apart from a number of smaller ones, showed the top of the silo and the heavy camouflage netting that concealed the concrete-lidded pit beneath.